Spend enough time around local television stations and you start to notice something interesting about the people responsible for the people.
At the station level, they may be called a Business Office Manager, Human Resources Manager or HR Business Partner. Sometimes they are responsible for HR along with payroll, benefits, accounting, compliance and whatever else happens to land on their desk.
At the corporate level, the titles get bigger: Vice President of Human Resources. Chief People Officer. Vice President of Talent Acquisition. Talent Partner.
The titles sound strategic. The question is whether the jobs actually are.
Because in too many broadcast organizations, HR is still primarily called after something happens. An employee needs to be disciplined. Someone resigns. A manager needs help documenting a performance problem. Benefits enrollment is coming. There’s an employee-relations issue. A position needs to be posted. Someone needs to complete the paperwork.
All necessary work.
But none of it addresses the bigger question:
Who inside the company is responsible for seeing the people problems before they become business problems?
That question should matter enormously to local television right now.
This is an industry dealing with consolidation, shrinking staffs, changing skill requirements, difficult relocations, aging technical talent, leadership succession issues and employees increasingly questioning whether there is a long-term career waiting for them. If there were ever a moment for HR to become more strategic, this is it.
Yet the station HR professional or Business Office Manager may know more about what’s happening inside the building than almost anyone else—and still have little involvement in the conversations that determine where the station is going.
They know which managers continually lose good people. They hear why employees leave. They know which departments are struggling to recruit and when morale begins to change. They know when a supposedly “great opportunity” has been open for six months. They know which high performers are quietly starting to ask questions about their careers.
They often see the smoke before anyone sees the fire.
But only if leadership asks.
Corporate HR has the same opportunity on a much larger scale. A broadcast group’s HR organization should be able to look across dozens of stations and identify patterns long before those patterns become crises.
Where is turnover accelerating? Which positions are becoming harder to fill? Which markets are losing candidates because compensation no longer matches the relocation required? Where is the next generation of News Directors, General Managers, Directors of Sales and Chief Engineers coming from? Which stations consistently develop talent—and which ones consistently lose it?
Those aren’t HR questions.
They’re business questions.
And then there is recruiting.
This one hits particularly close to home for me.
Recruiting is one of the few corporate functions where companies sometimes seem remarkably comfortable putting people in charge who have never actually been professional recruiters. I’ve seen people responsible for recruiting—and occasionally carrying significant Talent Acquisition titles—without meaningful professional recruiting backgrounds.
That doesn’t mean they aren’t smart people. It doesn’t mean they can’t learn.
But recruiting is a profession. And simply anointing someone a recruiter doesn’t make them one.
Think about it another way.
I’ve spent roughly 15 years around local television. I’ve recruited News Directors. I’ve interviewed them. I’ve worked with them. I’ve spent countless hours inside newsrooms and talking with the people who run them.
Now imagine somebody waved a magic wand over my head tomorrow and said:
Congratulations, Ty. You’re a News Director.
I’d know enough to be dangerous.
But I wouldn’t know how to run a newsroom.
Knowing the industry isn’t the same as knowing the profession. Recruiting should be viewed the same way.
A professional Talent Acquisition function isn’t just about finding candidates. Someone has to build the strategy behind how an enterprise attracts, assesses, selects and hires talent. That means establishing meaningful recruiting metrics—not simply counting how many jobs are open or how many people applied.
It means knowing time-to-fill, time-to-offer, source effectiveness, candidate conversion, offer acceptance rates, hiring-manager responsiveness, recruiting costs and where candidates are dropping out of the process. It means building systems and processes that can work consistently across an enterprise rather than having 40 stations essentially invent 40 different ways to hire people.
It means developing sourcing strategies instead of waiting for applications. It means understanding workforce planning and succession so every important opening doesn’t become an emergency. It means training hiring managers to interview effectively rather than assuming someone knows how to evaluate talent because they’ve been promoted into management.
And it means building a selection process that is consistent, documented and more legally defensible.
That’s not bureaucracy.
That’s infrastructure.
The irony is that companies would rarely hand another specialized corporate function to someone with no background in it. You wouldn’t appoint someone CFO because they’re good with spreadsheets. You wouldn’t put someone in charge of engineering because they’re good with computers. And a television station certainly wouldn’t make someone News Director because they’ve watched a lot of newscasts.
Yet recruiting can sometimes be treated as though anyone who is personable, organized and understands the company can do it.
They can certainly participate in it.
That’s different from knowing how to build and lead the function.
Because finding a résumé is not recruiting. Posting a job is not recruiting. Running a candidate through an applicant tracking system is not recruiting. Scheduling interviews is not recruiting. Continuously blasting out “amazing opportunities” to your LinkedIn followers is not recruiting.
And giving someone a Vice President of Talent Acquisition title doesn’t automatically make them a talent acquisition strategist.
Professional recruiting requires understanding markets, compensation, sourcing, metrics, systems/processes, assessment, candidate psychology, negotiation, relocation, succession, competitive intelligence and, perhaps most importantly, how to tell a senior leader something he or she may not want to hear:
Your salary is too low.
Your requirements are unrealistic.
Your interview process is taking too long.
The candidate doesn’t believe the opportunity is worth the relocation risk.
The person you want doesn’t want you.
That’s the value of experienced talent acquisition. It isn’t processing applicants. It’s bringing market intelligence back into the organization and helping leadership make better decisions.
And when recruiting is built correctly at the corporate level, it should do something else: give leadership visibility it didn’t have before.
If offer acceptance suddenly drops across multiple markets, that’s a signal. If relocation is killing searches that were fillable three years ago, that’s a signal. If certain managers repeatedly lose finalists, that’s a signal. If Chief Engineer searches routinely take months while the existing engineering workforce gets older, that’s a signal.
And if candidates consistently tell recruiters they don’t see enough upside to leave stable jobs for local television, that’s a very big signal.
A sophisticated Talent Acquisition function doesn’t simply fill those openings.
It connects the dots.
I spent years building and leading corporate talent acquisition inside broadcasting. Today I recruit from the other side of the table. That combination has given me an interesting view of what happens when the people function has influence—and what happens when it doesn’t.
The strongest HR and talent professionals aren’t there simply to execute management decisions. They should help shape them.
A station HRBP should be able to walk into the General Manager’s office and say, “Here’s what I’m seeing.”
Corporate HR should be able to walk into the CEO’s office and say, “We have a talent problem developing.”
Talent Acquisition should be able to say, “The market has changed. We need to change with it.”
And leadership should want to hear it.
Local television has spent enormous amounts of time debating its technology, distribution, ownership structures, and business models. All of those things matter.
But every one of those strategies ultimately depends on whether you have the people capable of executing it.
Maybe the industry doesn’t need another HR reorganization. Maybe it doesn’t need another new title.
Maybe it needs to start using the people already sitting in those chairs for what they should have been doing all along:
Seeing the signals before everyone else does.
About Carver Talent
Carver Talent specializes in recruiting high-impact leaders across local television, digital media, revenue leadership, news management and broadcast operations nationwide.
We understand the media business because we work inside its talent market every day — talking with the leaders running stations, newsrooms, sales organizations and operations, including many who aren’t actively looking for their next opportunity.
In a media landscape changing this quickly, finding the right leader matters more than ever.
Ty Carver is the Founder and CEO of Carver Talent and brings more than 30 years of recruiting, HR, sales and leadership experience, including the last 15 years focused specifically on the broadcast media industry.
Before founding Carver Talent, Ty served as Head of Talent Acquisition for Raycom Media, where he developed deep relationships throughout the industry and gained a unique perspective on the people and leadership challenges facing local media companies.
Today, Carver Talent helps media companies identify and recruit management and executive talent nationwide, with a particular focus on passive candidates who may never respond to a traditional job posting.
Have a corporate executive or television station management recruiting need? Contact ty@carvertalent.com to learn how Carver Talent can help.